Showing titles in City Life

Sophie and Tom first visited Paris together as students. During their weekend away in the world’s most romantic city, falling in love – with the place, and each other – was simply inevitable. They resolved to return every summer and kept their word, until something happened that changed their world forever.

Youth by Kevin Curran dives into the lives of four teenagers in Ireland's most diverse town, Balbriggan. Angel is about to finish school and discover if Drill music and his YouTube fame can deliver on their promises. Princess is battling to escape her claustrophobic surroundings and go to university. Dean is ready to come out from under his famous father's shadow. Tanya, struggling with the spotlight of internet infamy, is still posting her dream life for all of her faithful followers.

Written entirely in East Coast Scots, A Working Class State of Mind, the debut book by Colin Burnett, brings the everyday reality and language of life in Scotland to the surface. Colin's fiction takes themes in the social sciences and animates them in vivid ethnographic portrayals of what it means to be working-class in Scotland today. Delving into the tragic exploits of Aldo, as well as his long-suffering best friends Dougie and Craig, the book follows these and other characters as they make their way in a city more divided along class lines than ever before.

For Bryce Derrickson, rejection is nothing new. He’s used to Broadway casting directors seeing his size and assuming he can’t be a graceful dancer. But getting dumped with no notice is a special kind of burn. At least his sweet dog Bobo still loves him. As if being left without warning isn’t bad enough, Bryce’s ex sublets their apartment without telling him, leaving him without a place to live. When his new ‘roommate’ turns out to be a stuffy, elbow-patches-on-blazer, permanent-frown-on-face professor, Bryce is furious. No way will he give up his bohemian pad without a fight.

All around Albuquerque, New Mexico, young women are going missing, seemingly vanished into thin air. With no link between the victims, Detective Alyssa Wyatt is quickly plunged into a horrifying case with no obvious clues. And when Jersey Andrews, the best friend of Alyssa's teenage daughter, Holly, joins the list of vanished girls, the case becomes personal. But this investigation will lead Alyssa and partner Cord into the most sinister depths of humanity; an evil place where life is expendable and where the depraved can fulfill their darkest desires - if they have the money.

What will be will be. Belinda Marshall’s idyllic teenage life in Brittany, France, fell apart when her parents dramatically separated and her mother took her back to England. Fast forward 35 years when Belinda’s world is once again turned upside down. It’s the week before Christmas and her employer 'surprises’ Belinda by asking for her help to rejuvenate their latest investment, a run-down campsite in Brittany.

Hard Times is the tenth novel by Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirizes the social and economic conditions of the era. Hard Times is unusual in several ways. It is by far the shortest of Dickens's novels, barely a quarter of the length of those written immediately before and after it. Moreover, it is his only novel not to have scenes set in London. Instead, the story is set in the fictitious Victorian industrial Coketown, a generic Northern English mill-town.

England, 1941. Reunited briefly with her husband-to-be before he returns to fighting, Lily Baker now finds her mundane army office work dreary. But when her boss asks her to keep watch on the happenings at the depot, she quickly suspects a new weapons supplier of fraud. As she trains her sharp eye on the potential cheat, she agrees to help an unmarried colleague with an unexpected pregnancy. But when, without evidence, she is accused of being the one with child, she faces hard decisions.

Lady Georgiana Pendlebury is no stranger to breaking the rules of polite society. But when a so-called ‘friend’ invites her to a clandestine party, Georgiana is shocked to discover the event is more scandalous than even she could have imagined. So when a mysterious stranger offers help, she accepts, not realising their encounter will turn her life upside down.

What's more important—revenge . . . or the child you never knew you had? Jolie Chapman was my first love. Now she's my most bitter enemy. Screw me once, shame on you. Screw me twice . . . who am I kidding—I don't believe in second chances anymore. Tripp Montgomery was my first love. I gave him my innocence. Then he broke my heart. And I committed the ultimate betrayal. These Manhattan royals are out for revenge. Sweet, sweet revenge. But there's something they want more. Their daughter.

*LONGLISTED FOR THE SALTIRE BOOK AWARDS* 'A moving exploration of family, migration, class, queerness and belonging… beautifully rendered' JESSICA ANDREWS 'A deeply observant, perceptive writer' JOANNA CANNON 'Masterful' JJ BOLA 'Evocative, layered and emotionally resonant… deserves to be on...

Inspired by one of the first real-life female columnists at the New Yorker, this enticing historical mystery follows Freddie Archer as she solves crimes while reporting on the glamorous world of the rich and famous in 1920s Manhattan. This writer just found her next scoop . . . and it’s deadly...

ansa is a stress expert who can't manage her own stress. A mother whose children barely call. A daughter haunted by her mother's dementia. A woman one breath away from breaking. When she steps into a rickshaw in Mumbai, everything changes. Kirit, her calm driver, navigates impossible chaos with inexplicable peace.

Un viaggio in una Napoli inquieta e indimenticabile attraverso episodi al limite del paradossale che ci permettono di incontrare personaggi che resteranno per sempre nel nostro immaginario. "Una straordinaria discesa agli Inferi: nel regno della tenebra e delle ombre" per usare le parole di Pietro Citati. Una discesa attraverso corpi miseri e disperati nel buio profondo di una disparità intollerabile che ci svela i due volti di una città insieme meravigliosa e conturbante.

Bounty hunting can be dangerous, but Jace Reed is used to danger and always follows the rules. Including the most important one—never get emotionally involved. But everything goes haywire when the Brooklyn “it girl” interrupts his most important assignment. Beautiful Lucy Moor may or may not hold the only clue to the target that Jace has been tracking for months. So becoming her roommate to get the intel from her should be easy… right?

I know I have to get myself out of this funk, but it feels impossible. My childhood best friend is dead and nothing in life is working out as I’d planned. Then Lottie leaves me a ‘jar of joy’ in her will – filled with instructions to visit places where we had our happiest memories. But with every happy memory, I also remember the things that tore us apart. Because Lottie was keeping secrets. And Jay – the man we both loved – keeps turning up at the same places. Even as I feel pieces of myself begin to heal, some wounds run too deep.

It’s midnight in the city. The rain is relentless, the streets half-empty, and Sorrel Hart is desperate to get home. When a cab finally stops, warmth and safety seem only a door away. But as the journey unfolds through the blurred glow of streetlights, she begins to sense that not everything inside the car is as it seems.

Seventeen-year-old Tyler lives in one of Edinburgh’s most deprived areas. Coerced into robbing rich people’s homes by his bullying older siblings, he’s also trying to care for his little sister and his drug-addict mum. On a job, his brother Barry stabs a homeowner and leaves her for dead, but that’s just the beginning of their nightmare, because the woman is the wife of Edinburgh’s biggest crime lord, Deke Holt.

The banned books club was only the beginning; a place for the women of Prague to come together and share the tales the Germans wanted to silence. For bookshop owner, Jana, doing the right thing was never a question. So when opportunity comes to help the resistance, she offers herself – and her bookshop. Using her window displays as covert signals and hiding secret codes in book marks, she’ll do all in her power to help.

It is 1943 in Nazi-occupied Paris, and nobody is safe. Nobody, except perhaps one small group of people, who’ve always existed outside the law… At Le Cirque Casini, the trapeze artists still fly. The strong men still perform amazing feats. The sad-faced clowns still make people laugh, even in a city with a broken heart. The Nazis do not trouble them, as long as they keep the people happy and entertained.